With just three weeks to go in this election, North Carolina is once again at the forefront in trying to figure out how to keep Black people from voting, and voting safely. The state has been invalidating thousands of ballots—predominantly from Black voters—and the state and various federal courts have complicated the process voters can use to "cure" or fix the problems that threaten to invalidate their absentee ballots. As of now, some 6,800 ballots—2,776 of them from people of color—are in limbo in this key state, while ballots continue to come in.
There has been a lot of confusing litigation around absentee voting in the state in the past few months. One of the cases resulted in the state Board of Elections, last month, allowing voters to "cure" ballots with missing or incorrect information by filing an affidavit with county election officials. That was their part in a settlement in a case in which plaintiffs were trying to loosen restrictions on mail voting, as well as an extension for the deadline for ballots to be received up to November 12. The bipartisan Board of Elections unanimously approved that settlement, but then the two Republican members of the board resigned because it would be too easy for the voters whose ballots were in danger of being tossed to be able to correct them.
The judge in the case that led to that settlement and the elections board process, District Judge William L. Osteen Jr., a George W. Bush appointee, has criticized the affidavit process saying it basically does away with the witness requirement, which he called "a reasonable measure to deter fraud," and could toss it. The Trump campaign has emailed local elections official telling them to ignore the agreement. North Carolina official have asked U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit to rule.
In the meantime, people are voting in what's basically limbo, and the election is just three weeks away. "Nothing is happening—nothing. So it's definitely concerning," Marian Lewin, a vice president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina told The Washington Post. "I'm dismayed because voters don't know where they stand. […] A week of inaction is scary, but two weeks. […] Welcome to North Carolina." So that's led to the thousands of ballots being stuck in what's called "pending cure" stage, 2,776 of them from Black voters, 2,490 from White, non-Hispanic voters. That's well more than half the ballots with Blacks comprising just 22% of the state's population.
“What we’re finding is that indeed, voters of color—particularly Black African American voters—are having a higher percentage of their ballots currently held to cure,” said J. Michael Bitzer, a politics and history professor at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, who has been tracking the data. He says that part of the problem is that Black voters in North Carolina are new to vote by mail—in 2016, only 3% mailed in ballots. According to his analysis, about 4% of all Black mailed-in ballots are pending cure, as opposed to 1% for white voters. One county in particular stands out—Guilford, in which 20.3% of rejected, "pending cure" ballots are from Black voters.
Ballots have been in limbo now for for a week. "You never want to go into a situation where people are already voting or have the potential to cast ballots and are unsure of what will happen to their ballot when they return it," Bitzer told local station WBTV in a separate interview, but that's where voters in North Carolina are right now. Those who have voted and have their ballots pending can only wait to see what courts do. Voters who haven't sent in ballots yet have to make the decision of whether to take a chance that their vote doesn't count by mailing it, or chance risking their health by voting in person.